User talk:Blebaford

Answer about unsourced

Hi, you asked a good question on a talkpage, and though you deleted it, I thought you might still be interested in an answer. There are millions of articles on Wikipedia that were created before firm rules on verifiability and reliable sourcing became widely accepted. As a result, there is an awful lot of unsourced content still in articles. Hopefully, eventually, editors will add sources to pre-existing content where they're needed. But going forward, any time an editor adds content to an article, they had to have gotten it from somewhere and they need to cite the source for that information. We can't change what was acceptable in the past, but we can be vigilant in requiring sources for new/changed content. Does that make sense? Schazjmd (talk) 18:58, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

I deleted it because I realized some of the content was backed up in a reliable source referenced earlier in the article. What you've said makes sense, but I still wonder about content that was added relatively recently (within the past year), does not have a reliable source, and yet has not been removed. When did the verifiability rules become widely accepted? If an edit in violation of these rules has been left for a matter of weeks or months, should it still be reverted? Blebaford (talk) 19:33, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

If nobody notices an edit, it's easy for unverifiable content to get in. Whether to tag that content as template:citation needed or to remove it is up to the editor who catches it. In a WP:BLP, you might lean toward remove. In another subject area, you might tag it. Sometimes the tag motivates another article-watcher to track down a ref. I've removed content from a number of articles because they'd been tagged unsourced for several years. I've also found refs when another editor tagged a claim in an article I was watching as needing a source. It's also not uncommon for other editors to object to the removal of content and it become a content dispute.

So the more new edits without sources that get caught and reverted, the fewer problems we introduce into articles that may already have other problems. Schazjmd (talk) 20:17, 20 November 2020 (UTC)